Healthy Body = Fuel For Change
So many clients come to me intending to transform their career or life in general, to get a better balance and feel more fulfilled. But when we take an inventory of where they are now, they often realize that they lack the fuel for change.
- They are exhausted
- Spinning their wheels but not getting anywhere
- Lacking sleep
- Fighting with food addictions
- Creeping health issues
- Overbooked schedules as The Excuse for keeping stuck.
Adding health as another item on the full to-do list is simply not realistic.
That’s why all their previous attempts to change didn’t bring as much effect as they hoped. And these failed attempts caused more frustration and drained their energy further. It’s a downward spiral.
How can you get your energy and health back in a schedule-friendly way with long-lasting effects?
You can learn the tools and techniques behind the magic that I use with my clients. I’ll teach you how to apply them so that you can get the same transformational results:
- Weightloss
- Increased self-confidence
- High level of energy and overall feeling of joy and happiness
- More patience and parental zen attitude
- More clarity in decision making
You can download my worksheet or use your usual journal to take notes. Either way, I always recommend noting down your responses so that you can track your progress as you go and celebrate!
Your Health Wheel
If you’ve read a bit around my blog, you can tell that I love using wheels. They are simple, yet powerful – organizing visually the different categories and enabling new insights.
The aim of this health wheel is for you to zoom in your health and level of energy:
What areas do you need to take care of so that you feel healthy and in love with your body?
Because only then, once you stop obsessing about those last x kilos to lose and have enough sleep to feel energized throughout the day, you can start conquering your life goals, that career change, being a more zen mom, … whatever goal you’re chasing to feel more fulfilled and happy.
Time to get to work!
Step 1: Create & Label The Wheel Segments
Let’s imagine your overall health and level of energy could be mapped into a wheel.
What areas of your health are most important to you?
Each of the wheel segments that looks like a pizza pie represents one area.
This exercise is very individual, no Health Wheel usually looks the same.
Keep in Mind: Focus on the Positive Outcome
The key rule they all must apply: all the segments must be labeled in a positive way – what your desired outcome is (not what you want to avoid, or don’t want).
For example: instead of slouched, aching back, label one of the wheel segments strong, straight back.
Remember, your brain is a target seeking machine. Give it a target “lose 10 kg” and it will just keep on reminding you of the extra 10 kilos hanging around your body. Try something like “feeling fit and loving the way my body looks”. I bet you feel the shift in energy just by reading it.
You can close your eyes and imagine how perfect health looks like for you.
How would you love to feel in your body?
What level of energy would you like to experience daily?
And how do others benefit from you being healthy?
(For example being able to see your grandkids growing up and spend fun playtime with them, feeling healthy and full of energy after you retire one day so that you can continue ticking off your bucket list of places to see and adventures to live.)
Can you see how your health and energy impacts the quality of your life?
Great! So now draw and label your health wheel.
Look at the wheel and think about the areas that your ideal health includes. The usual suspects are refreshing sleep, clear mind (instead of headaches), strong back, high level of energy, balanced with time to relax, and any specific health challenges you might have. I tore the ligaments of my knee more than a decade ago and it’s been bothering me since. So one of my areas on the Health Wheel is a stable, strong knee.
You get the idea. Go around your wheel and write down as many categories as you wish. If you need more than 8, feel free to divide the pie further to create more slices.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Current State of Health
The purpose of this step is to assess your starting point.
It’s difficult to evaluate something as intangible as the level of your health. So to do that, we will use a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 stand for a very low level (at the center of the wheel) and 10 is the maximum, full health (the rim of the wheel).
You can look at each segment of your wheel now and ask:
How do I experience this area of my health these days?
And write down a number 1-10 next to it. For example, if I did this wheel during the first weeks of my daughter’s life, I’d evaluate my sleep at level 1. I was flat exhausted!
Give each segment of your wheel a number. Then you can even plot them this way, to make it more visual.
Step 3: Reflection
This is my favorite step because that’s where the Ah-Ha! magic happens.
Look at your wheel as a whole. What stands out to you?
What are the one or two key areas that if you worked on them, your overall health and level of energy would improve?
Highlight them in any way you wish.
Step 4: Let Go
Now on the contrary to all the usual processes where you start listing the action to improve the current situation, you will continue by letting go. You need to create space first.
The key question is:
What would you like to let go of, to improve your highlighted areas?
Write down the list.
My Silly Example…
… Admitting how silly and blind I used to be. My biggest pain point has been that knee. But at the same time, during my expatriate assignment in China, I gained weight. I was feeling so lonely, isolated, and overworked… I had lots of ‘good’ excuses to use food to comfort myself. But it was the first time in my life that I gained weight uncontrollably. And I got scared.
So I started running. Great cardio to lose weight fast, right? I bought the best running shoes I could get to protect my knee. (Or at least that’s what I was hoping for.) But you can guess what the result was. I did lose all that extra weight in a few short months and I fell in love with running. But my knee had enough. One day it snapped and I tore off some of those remaining ligament strands that were holding it together. How stupid. Now I know. But I had those clashing health goals. And what I didn’t realize back then was that protecting my knee should have been a priority and I should have come up with different ways to lose weight.
I’m exposing my silliness hoping you won’t make the same mistake. Look at how your Health Wheel works together.
What should you stop doing to protect your health?
What would be a smarter way to get the outcome you want?
You see, the secret is not WHAT but HOW.
You know very well that you should stop smoking, or quit drinking so much. Or limit your sugar intake and do more exercise. But how? You tried so many programs, hacks, latest trends, …and most likely it contradicted with another important area of your life.
And the hack didn’t work in the long run because it was asking too much too fast. That’s where our next secret ingredient comes. Enter, micro habits!
Step 5: Micro Habits
If you’re not familiar with the power of micro habits, you can read my post. It’s so simple and elegant, and it works like magic.
So let’s apply this for your health transformation too.
Thinking about those smarter ways to improve one or two of your health areas, let’s break it down into mini actions so small that they would take only 1-5 min each day.
What action would be so easy that you’d have no excuse not to do it every day from now on?
Examples:
- Getting stronger: stop taking the elevator and climb the stairs. Parc the car one block further away so that you have to walk for 5 min longer.
- Eating/drinking ‘clean’: replace 1 glass a day of your usual sugary drink with 1 glass of water
- Refreshing sleep: no screen time (TV, phone, tablet) 10min before going to bed. Spend the last 5 min of your waking time by doing some other, relaxing activity. (Ideally, gratitude journaling or meditation)
Keep it simple. The point is to avoid mountain high goals that exhaust you during the first 3 days, when your sheer power of will gets tired and you slip right back where you were, even more frustrated with yourself.
Small baby steps are all it takes to build up the healthy habits.
Heads Up
You won’t see or feel much progress for the first days and weeks. But I can promise because I’ve seen it work for all of my clients, the results are coming. You are building on them each day. You might see them in 3 weeks or 3 months. They will come.
And it will encourage you to take more action, stack more micro habits. And you will feel proud of yourself for sticking with it. Your health improves, you feel more energized, more patient with your children, more efficient at work.
All it takes is taking this one tiny action, day by day.
Let me know how it goes!
And share all your little and big wins to celebrate.
Shine bright,
